The backlash against the wholesale destruction of physical books has left some AI advocates baffled, chalking it up to ignorance, outrage at easy targets. In The Atlantic, Alex Reisner examined several of the central claims now circulating online. He wrote that part of the problem is that “the specifics of this situation are obscured by hard-to-trace purchasing histories and the silence of AI companies and other potential buyers,” leaving many unanswered questions. He also noted that among the books being destroyed are technical and academic titles, considered “rare” only in the narrow sense of being out of print. These are things the average person would presumably never read, let alone miss upon their being mulched. (And many, if not most, books end up in landfills or recycling without Big AI’s assistance.) And yet, Reisner still found plenty of cause for concern in the process of taking millions of books, denuding them of their creators, and throwing them into the maw of a chatbot. “It masks the hard work and collaboration that goes into knowledge creation, undermines incentives for authors to write books, prevents experts from finding one another, and gives companies tremendous power over what information people can access,” he concluded.

Those who wave away the outcry as the stuff of book-obsessives risk missing the essential point Reisner is getting at, one that goes beyond books. It’s the same reason people don’t like the vision of a future in which every American lives under the watchful eye of an AI-powered surveillance network, such as the notions promoted by Garrett Langley, the founder and CEO of Flock, an Atlanta-based technology company whose wares include automated license plate readers. It is the same reason people in Ohio, where I live, protested against a proposal by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to make it easier for data centers to dump wastewater into lakes, rivers, and streams without consequence.

It’s not a mystery what links these varied assertions of tech power: There is a growing fear that the developers and proprietors of AI are recklessly scaling what is arguably the most world’s most powerful force at breakneck speed with little regard for the human things that are torn asunder in the wake, whether that’s physical books, art, privacy, or the environment. And whenever something like Project Panama comes to light, those concerns seem increasingly valid.